Love, Anger, Madness

“Do you hear the bells?”

He pricks up his ears attentively. His young, angelic face, black and beautiful, is lifted toward the ceiling, disfigured by fear.

The room smells disgusting. Or is it the corpse?

“Did you hear it?”

“Yes,” he answers.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Andre sighs.

“Leave God and the saints in peace.”

“You can’t stop me from praying,” he protests.

“Let him pray,” Jacques says softly.

It is high time to begin preparations for the struggle. Alone. I am going to do it all alone. What can I hope for from these two? They really seem to be dying. They’re my buddies, I pity them. But this is no time for pity. I have to act.

The corpse is starting to scare me. It’s disintegrating there before my eyes as a reminder of what awaits me. I don’t dare unplug the hole. Dong… dong… dong… The bell keeps tolling in its mournful reverberation. Could that be Father Angelo burying the dead under the very noses of the devils? Bravo, Father Angelo! There’s a real man under that cassock of yours. I immediately get up. Now I am resolved. I am going to leave and rouse the town. As cowardly as they may be, they will have to come out of their lairs to listen to me. I am waiting for Jacques and Andre to fall asleep to open the door. Perhaps I’ll die. But no matter! First I will alert Commandant Cravache. He’ll have to prove his courage, justify his epaulettes and medals, and outdo himself, for fear of an official report. I will also notify the mayor, that fat bastard who does nothing but fuck Laurette, the prostitute on rue des Saints. Like it or not, he’ll also answer the call and for once work to save our town, along with the prefect and Dr. Premature, who carry weapons as well. They seem harmless and absolutely hopeless next to the devils. All the same, I am secretly convinced that, once the fight begins, the devils will find in them the most terrible of adversaries. Unless, of course, they panic and run first. You never know what to expect from these monkeys. In any case, it falls to me to set an example, to make them come out of their torpor. I will have weapons of my own. Molotov cocktails that I will light but not throw at the devils. Who knows how they will react to fire? I am going to try to communicate with Cecile before throwing myself into this adventure-a dangerous one, I have no illusions about that. Though in my weakened state I’ve been rambling, frolicking in the past, I still feel that I am in possession of all my faculties. My black mother didn’t nurse me for two years for nothing. I am filled with no less courage and fervor than Samson leading his Israelite brethren. From the beginning, I’ve known that once my plan was ripe I would not back out. Only a Haitian, however well intentioned and determined, is unable to consider death without thinking for days about what could have been, what should have been and what will never be. A hairsbreadth away from death, I will dream of a final spasm on top of a juicy black woman’s soft round belly. I will close my eyes with Cecile’s braids flowing over my face. And death will be nothing but a game for me. I think of her black eyes, her black hair, her plum-brown skin, as I rip open my mother’s old pillow for cotton.

“What are you doing?” Andre asks me.

“Nothing. Sleep, sleep.”

Jacques snores quietly on his side, head in his poems.

I am watching Andre out of the corner of my eye. As soon as I catch him closing his eyes, I rummage in the trunk and find six empty bottles. I squat and start stuffing them with cotton, my back turned to my friends. I wet the cotton with alcohol and stick the matchbox in my pocket. That’s it! I’m ready. Where is the army of devils right now? That’s what I am trying to find out as I look outside through the hole. The bells toll. Dong! Dong! Dong! And nothing else save a terrible humming, as if thousands of insects were flying around me. But there’s not a single insect. Not even a mosquito. Nothing. Maybe it’s just the screaming silence that a human ear can make out only when everything is quiet. In any case something mysterious is happening in the room: two stars fly out of my eyes dancing and then flee through the keyhole. I run to the door and see two eyes staring at me from outside. Someone is there, I’m sure of it. Putting a finger to my lips, I wake up Andre:

“There is someone behind the door,” I say to him.

He quietly leaps onto his knees and clasps his trembling hands together.

“Don’t move,” he says to me.

There is a knock at the door.

Jacques wakes up and I put a hand over his mouth.

“The devils?” he whispers to me.

“Hush! Quiet!” Andre tells him.

And he pulls Jacques toward him and puts an arm around his neck.

We stay there like that, all three of us mute, pouring sweat. I hear bullets whistling, brushing against the roof of the house. The front door is riddled with them. A lightning bolt explodes in the sky and sets off a downpour over the sheet metal. Water seeps through the roof. A hail of metallic balls bounce at regular intervals, sounding just like bullets. A powerful blast disperses the trees. I hear them run and shriek. I rush to the wall and glue my eye to the hole. The trees lie on the ground. The sky has opened. Gigantic black clouds wrestle each other furiously Fireworks explode, throwing up dazzling arabesques here and there. The crowd is hanging from the clouds. It is weeping, its tears streaming down on the road. The corpse is floating in a lake. It’s at eye level now.

I am unsteady on my legs. Bones crackle in my head and two more stars come out of my eyes and stay there whirling round the room with no intention of leaving…

“What’s going on?” Andre asks me.

“Nothing. It’s the rain. I swear, go back to sleep.”

“You haven’t seen them?” Jacques asks me.

“Who?”

“The devils.”

“No. Lie down and go to sleep.”

“I need to be alone…”

At the age of twelve I became very sick. And my black mother Angelie, who believed as much in the loas as she did in God, as much in the houngan as in the doctor, got all mixed up in her panic and called the priest, the doctor and the houngan at the same time. Dr. Chanel was such a crafty old peasant that he energetically shook Gromalin’s hand, saying to him:

“We’ll save him, my colleague.”

But Father Angelo absolutely refused to shake the hand of the voodoo priest.

“Angelie, my daughter,” he reproached my mother, “why have you called me to your house to see a houngan?”

But she was weeping at my bedside.

“Ah, my father,” she wailed, “you come from a white country where people are good to each other. Here, in Haiti, the devils are everywhere. They take the shape of honest people. They greet you and say, ‘So long, my friend, good health to you and yours, sister’; they look at you with innocent eyes and settle the score with you in an underhanded way. As for me, I am sure my little Rene doesn’t have a natural illness, an illness that good Dr. Chanel can cure. Only the houngan can fight the spirits of the dead that some of my neighbors have set upon my child.”

“Angelie! Angelie!” Father Angelo protested. “Voodoo is making you lose your head! You have nothing but good neighbors! Good people who have known you since childhood and who have never hurt a fly. Don’t you know it is wrong to be on terms with the devil?”

“Evil exists, my father, evil exists. I am afraid of them, I am afraid of them all, even of my cousin Madame Macius.”

“Justina!” the priest cried out. “But you are crazy, my poor Angelie. Never accuse your fellow man if you don’t want God to judge you harshly, and follow Dr. Chanel’s advice if you want to save your child.”

But my poor black mother, who could neither read nor write and who piously served her loas, also followed the advice of Gromalin. She bought the medicine prescribed by the doctor and, secretly, received a simple from the houngan, which she put under my pillow and for which he asked a lot more than the disciple of Ascelpius who had actually saved my life. For my mother, my